You could practically rip the plotline of Olen Steinhauer's new spy novel, The Cairo Affair, from the front pages of yesterday's newspaper. But you wouldn't get the whole story 'cause you don't have the clearance.

Fortunately for espionage fiction fans, Steinhauer engages readers with top-secret status. That said, good luck solving this elaborate labyrinth of a spy tale set mostly in Cairo during the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011. Prepare to guess wrong.

The novel starts in Langley. Libyan-American CIA analyst Jibril Aziz is connecting dots and thinking his previously trashed secret plan called "Stumbler," which plots the overthrow of crazed Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi, is suddenly and inexplicably going operational. So, on his own, he sets out for North Africa amid revolutionary times to find out who and why.

Meanwhile, at a restaurant in Budapest, minutes after American diplomat Emmett Kohl confronts his wife Sophie about her affair with a CIA agent the year before when they were stationed in Cairo, he is point-blank gunned down by an Eastern European hit man. It's another who and why that sets everything else in motion.

And self-centered, deceitful, conflicted, confused, Harvard-grad Sophie is motivated to untangle the mystery of her husband's murder — or, more importantly, perhaps, reassure herself that she wasn't somehow responsible. So she sneaks back to Cairo.

This spy novel promisingly begins with a bang. And, without giving up a spoiler, the novel ends with a bang. In between, Steinhauer, author of the best seller The Tourist (2010 movie version starring Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp) and one of the hottest names in spy fiction today, borrows from benchmark espionage novelist John Le Carré in style and structure to create an entertaining read.

Stylistically, the author overlaps plot segments from the point of view of each character. It's Durrell-esque, a compliment, as in The Alexandria Quartet, but in shorter form and about espionage instead of love. Yet it lends redundancy to an otherwise nicely conversational narrative.

Speaking of love, there's not much here. Sophie doesn't really love her husband Emmett; she doesn't love Cairo-based CIA agent Stan Bertolli with whom she had an affair that had nothing to do with romance; and, she doesn't love Zora Balaševic, the disturbing, manipulative Serbian spy who seduces Sophie's integrity more than her body.

One of the novel's strengths is that Steinhauer makes his settings seem so incredibly real. Cairo is vivid; it not only looks like Cairo, it smells, tastes, sounds like Cairo. Serbia is high quality, too, feeling like what Serbia must have been in 1991, the broken English translating automatically into Eastern European accents, the pungent food, the wanna-be American music, the ever-present plum aperitif, the pre-apocalypse disco.

But what's vital is that the underlying language of this novel is the secret tradecraft used by spies throughout the world. Everybody here lies. Everybody has secrets and trades secrets. It's a small-world clandestine cloister of continuous danger where information is the currency, deception is a survival skill, and betrayal the norm — professionally, politically and personally.

Steinhauer follows in the literary footsteps of le Carré. But where he stumbles is in creating a cast of well-drawn characters who simply are not likable — at least none still standing as the plot moves forward toward the end. So it's hard to identify the bad guys, much less the good ones.

Perhaps that's the author's statement about the nature of modern-day intelligence warfare where no traditional heroes emerge, no antiheroes, no morality, no loyalty, only suspects and survivors. There is no strong protagonist trying to stop something cataclysmic. It leaves the reader trusting no one, caring about no one, rooting for no one— until nearly the very end, when an unlikely "hero" steps up with moral compass in hand.

The Cairo Affair contains enough credible spy craft, dead bodies, lies and deceptions to cloud almost every page, plus incisive observations of the politics and perils of international espionage.

But as a spy thriller, it's more spy than thriller. These pages are filled not so much with conflict as with the conflicted. What seems lacking is fire-in-the-belly storytelling filled with suspense and not just suspicions, the words that keep readers breathlessly turning those pages instead of suspiciously turning them.